Development of terabit‐class super‐networking technologies

We propose terabit-class super-networking technologies, designed to improve the scalability, reliability and performance of optical Internet protocol networks. Our technologies comprise both intra- and interlayer traffic engineering technologies. The intralayer technologies include an optical path protection scheme, an electrical load-balancing scheme and a distributed content-caching scheme. These provide an effective and economical way of improving performance and reliability. The interlayer technologies include both traffic-driven and application-driven optical cut-through control schemes and a policy control scheme. These provide an effective and economical way of improving scalability and performance. The feasibility of our technologies has been verified by means of experiments using prototype systems. The results showed that the different techniques can be combined to form a single network architecture for dynamic optical path control. Copyright © 2007 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.